Giants send down Buster Posey: Could be mid-June before he’s back up

* No need to be frilly and long-winded here. I’ll make my Final Four game picks fast: Butler 67-62 over Michigan State and West Virginia 68-65 over Duke. Neither game will be pretty, but there will be some tremendous defense played by all four teams.

A lot of it makes sense, especially if, like me, you’ve long ago concluded that manager Bruce Bochy decided last summer that Posey would not be catching for him to start this year.

So Posey looked good in spring training, batting .321 with a .453 slugging percentage, but he gets sent down.

Will the Giants’ hitting suffer without him? Maybe. But Bochy’s not going to play him much–at catcher, at first, at third, or anywhere–unless there’s an injury.

He’s just not going to play him for now. I think that was decided last season.

So Posey apparently impressed Bochy with his receiving skills (remember, Lincecum and Cain are not easy to catch), but he had no chance to beat out Bengie Molina.

And if Posey isn’t going to play three or four games a week–say, 2 behind the plate and 1 or 2 at first base–it’s better for him to go down to Fresno for a few reasons…

* The Fresno manager is Steve Decker, a rising star in the organization and a long-time former catcher. The Giants moved Decker to Fresno this year, might as well place him with the franchise’s prized asset, who is a catcher.

And it’d be no shock if Decker is managing Posey again… in San Francisco… in a matter of a few years.

Summary: He accrued 33 days of major league service time last year. If the Giants keep him in Fresno at least through May 20, they’d keep him from accruing enough time this year to push him over the one-year mark.

That would guarantee that Posey can’t become a free agent until after the 2016 season.

According to my own calculations, there’s even more incentive to keep Posey down in Fresno a few weeks into June to keep his arbitration clock from jumping ahead.

By doing that, the Giants would lessen or eliminate the chance that Posey qualifies for arbitration in 2013, one year earlier than normal, as a Super-2 player, which is how Tim Lincecum qualified this year.

Lincecum was called up May 6, 2007–if he’d been called up about 10 days later, Lincecum would not have qualified for arbitration this year, and we saw the drama that presented the team.

Remember, Posey already has the 33 days of service-time from last year.

Just a tremendous decision, since Bochy decided to give him only 17 at-bats and have him catch 40 innings and play Eli Whiteside over him when he gave Molina rests last summer.

So those 33 days in the bank might delay Posey’s call-up this year… about 33 days, I’m thinking.

Of course, all of this could be moot if Molina slumps badly or gets hurt or there’s an injury at first base, or the Giants can’t hit in the early-going, and need a jolt. Some chance of many of those things happening.

And the arbitration/free-agency worries would have to go out the window.

All those could’ve been reasons Posey should’ve remained on the 2010 opening day roster, but oh well.